TeideHPC and AnagaGPU benefit from an expansion that increases capacity to 2.4 PB and improves energy efficiency, powering cutting-edge research in genomics, meteorology, artificial intelligence and more.
The supercomputing department of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Energías Renovables (ITER), belonging to the Technology Area, has completed the installation and integration of an extension of the storage system available for the supercomputers of the center. Both TeideHPC and AnagaGPU will benefit from the expansion of the storage system by renewing their storage cabinets and increasing the total storage capacity from 1.3 to 2.4 PB (the equivalent of about 24,000 movies in 4K format). This upgrade responds to the growing demand for storage capacity by researchers and scientists who require high-performance resources to carry out complex research and data analysis in fields such as genomics, meteorology and climatology, artificial intelligence or volcanology, among others.
The upgrade and expansion consisted of adding a new dual controller to the storage cluster along with new high-capacity disks. This replaced four individual controllers that were already obsolete and removed approximately 500TB of hard disks that had reached the end of their useful life. This new infrastructure takes up less physical space and consumes less power, making the new configuration more energy-efficient.
In addition to the improvement in terms of capacity, the storage system has been interconnected to the compute nodes through multiple 100Gbps links, with an aggregate bandwidth of 800Gbps, replacing the 10Gbps links, which aggregated a bandwidth of 200Gbps. This has resulted in a four-fold increase in the total bandwidth at which the storage system presents information to connected clients.
The renovation of the storage system and the increase in installed capacity will have a significant impact on the field of high-performance computing. The increased storage capacity enables researchers to conduct more ambitious research and analyze more complex data. At the same time, equipment renewal improves storage efficiency and reliability, ensuring data integrity and continuous system availability. This is the main reason for the decision to add new controllers to provide more redundancy to the system and not just to add more disk volume.
The expansion of the storage system is a milestone within the strategy of renovation and capacity expansion of the computing infrastructure offered by ITER through its supercomputing department. This process started with the installation of AnagaGPU for the diversification of the type of computing services offered as well as the promotion of current technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and foresees the improvement of the CPU-based computing infrastructure in the near future.
